By James Hall
MBABANE, May 3 2005 (IPS)

For years, health surveys in the wake of southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic have shown that itinerate occupations like truck drivers and seasonal agricultural workers pose a greater risk for workers of contracting and spreading HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

These occupations are opposed to jobs that do not require workers to travel or be apart from their homes for long periods of time.

But it is not scientific studies that are bringing a backlash against itinerate workers among local communities, but their own experiences witnessing AIDS’ growth.

Recently, a prominent traditional leader active in the fight against HIV/AIDS went so far as to blame truck drivers from foreign nations for the spread of the disease in Swaziland.

‘’They take advantage of the poverty in the country to entice women into sex for money or a meal,” Chief Mzweleni Dlamini told King Mswati at a meeting of local leaders in the southern Shiselweni Region.

The health ministry and HIV/AIDS groups are familiar with the problem of itinerate truckers. These drivers ply the routes from landlocked Swaziland to South Africa’s Indian Ocean port of Durban and South Africa’s industrial and commercial hub of Gauteng, who are at risk of contracting and spreading HIV.

‘’Truckers do contribute to the spread of the disease, but they are not the principal cause of Swaziland’s HIV prevalence rate, which at about 40 percent of the adult population is currently the highest of any country in the world. But it is unfair to single them out, and inaccurate to say truckers are a principal cause of infection,” said AIDS activist Sempiwe Hlope.

Chief Dlamini’s remarks that residents near the LaVumisa border post were ‘’unfortunate” because they must encounter truck drivers were criticised by local business leaders who seek to expand manufacturing and road freight in the southern region. They say Swaziland should not be singled out in a health crisis that affects all Southern African countries.

‘’I am losing too many drivers (to AIDS), but they are also South Africans, Botswanans, Zimbabweans,” Willie Stuart, president of Speedy Overborder, a trucking firm that carries packages to many nations in the 13-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), told IPS.

Truckers usually sleep in their vehicles and either entice women residing near overnight truck stops to have sex with them or pay commercial sex workers, who habituate places where truckers congregate.

While health officials are calling it discriminatory policy, the wealth community of Ezulwini, a suburb of Swaziland’s capital Mbabane, has banned construction workers hostels. The comprehensive plan for Ekuthuleni Township, which when completed will comprise of up market homes, was approved by the Ezulwini City Council with this stipulation: ‘’The contractor shall ensure that workers do not camp on site. Only watchmen will be allowed to stay on site after working hours.”

The city council demanded a plan that took into consideration the effect the construction project would have on the area’s AIDS situation.

While contractors are worried about housing and transporting their work crews – Ezulwini is home to an expanding number of the country’s luxury hotels and tourist attractions – AIDS activist see discrimination overturning a century’s tradition of workers hostels.

‘’Single sex hostels were always a necessary evil. They were unnatural environments where men had to live without wives or female companions, so they became incubators of sexually transmitted diseases when workers engaged the services of prostitutes. These sex diseases returned home with the workers, to infect wives, fiances and girlfriends,” said Gladys Simelane, who counsels people living with HIV/AIDS.

But Simelane argued that banishing hostels without alternative housing is unfair to workers.

‘’This has implications for all industries that have to house their workers in hostels. There is mining, of course, because of the large number of miners who must gather at sites located in the middle of nowhere, and agriculture, where large numbers of workers are employed only on a seasonal basis. They are also housed in same sex dormitories or camps. These groups of workers are vulnerable to HIV transmission,” Simelane said.

Like other health officials, however, she feels the answer is not to ban truckers from sleeping in their cabs, or making thousands of workers homeless by banishing hostels, but to expand HIV/AIDS prevention education, targeting also commercial sex workers who service itinerate workers.

More than 14 million people are living with HIV/AIDS across southern Africa, amounting to well over one third of people living with the virus worldwide, in an area with only two percent of the global total population, said the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

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